SporeKit™ Syringe

Cost: A few pounds per test

Formats: Grain or agar, standard or deluxe

Incubation temp: About 22 to 27C, dark

First signs (agar): Clean white mycelium in roughly 3 to 7 days

First signs (grain): White growth over roughly one to two weeks

Storage: Fridge 2 to 8C, sealed, dark, do not freeze

Clean test: Doubles as a live culture syringe

A way to check your spores before you trust them

Nobody can open and test every spore syringe they sell, because opening one would break its sterility. So any syringe you buy, from anyone, is taken on trust until you germinate it. SporeKit lets you do that germination on a small, cheap unit instead of on the substrate you actually care about.

You take a small amount of your spore material, introduce it to the SporeKit, seal it and leave it somewhere warm and dark. Over the following days you watch it. Healthy spores germinate into clean white mycelium. Contamination usually shows itself as cloudiness, off colours such as green, grey, pink or black, or a sour smell. Spotting that on a small test is far better than spotting it after you have inoculated a whole kit.

Running a test

1

Work clean

Wipe down a still, draught-free surface. Clean your hands and any tools with isopropyl. Flame-sterilise a needle or scalpel if you are scraping from a print. The cleaner you work, the more your test result reflects the spores and not your technique.

2

Introduce the spores

For a liquid spore syringe, inject a small amount into the grain format. For dry spores from a print or a swab, streak them onto the agar format. You only need a little. The point is to germinate a sample, not to use up your whole syringe.

3

Seal and incubate

Close it up and keep it somewhere warm and dark, around 22 to 27C. Do not disturb it.

4

Watch and read the result

On agar, clean white mycelium usually appears within about 3 to 7 days, sometimes longer with older or stubborn spores. In grain, expect little to see for the first week, then white growth from the inoculation points over roughly one to two weeks. Clean, even, white growth is a pass. Anything cloudy, coloured or smelly is a fail you have caught early.

Grain or agar

Grain is set up for liquid spore syringes, where the spores arrive already suspended in sterile water and are easy to inject. Agar is set up for dry spores taken from a spore print scraping or a swab, where a flat surface lets you streak the spores out and watch individual points germinate. Agar also lets you do something grain cannot. If one patch comes up clean next to a contaminated one, you can cut out a piece of the clean mycelium and move it to a fresh plate, away from the problem. The deluxe version gives you more medium so you can run several tests at once, or do that kind of clean-up across a few plates.

A clean test is not wasted. The colonised growth can be drawn up and used as a live culture syringe, so a passing test leaves you with a verified, clean culture to inoculate your next substrate.

Keeping it, and what it will not do

Keep your spore material and any culture you make in the fridge, around 2 to 8C, sealed and away from light. Use the body of the fridge, not the door, where the temperature swings. Do not freeze it, as ice crystals rupture the spores. Stored that way, spore material commonly stays viable for many months, often a year or more. Let anything cold come up to room temperature before you open or use it.

SporeKit is a testing and culturing tool, not a grow kit. It will not fruit mushrooms on its own and it is not a substitute for working cleanly. A clean test tells you your spores germinated cleanly on the day you ran it. Because a spore syringe is a mix of many spores, the resulting growth can also vary from patch to patch, which is normal. It cannot promise the rest of your grow will stay clean if your later technique is poor, and it cannot rescue spores that were already dead or contaminated. It simply shows you the truth sooner.